One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

National Twilight Zone: Season Five (Underrated but Great)

Across the decades, Rod
Serling’s The Twilight Zone has rightfully earned a vast number of
plaudits. The anthology is beloved by
generations, and seemingly exists as a permanent part of the American pop
culture firmament. The series been re-made on television twice
(once in 1985 and once in 2002), and a feature film premiered in 1983, with
another one slated for release in the years ahead.

And
yet to listen to the accepted narrative about it, The Twilight Zone’s
quality degenerated as it reached its final year. The fourth season experiment of making the
series episodes an hour in length was hard to recover from, the legend goes. Creator Rod Serling was burned-out after
writing something like eighty episodes and long-standing writers apparently had
copious complaints with the new producer, William Froug.

While
all of this background material may indeed be one-hundred percent true, an
unbiased look at the final batch of Twilight Zone episodes reveals that
the series was actually still in its creative prime.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so take a moment and just gaze across the episode
catalog and you’ll see that the final tally of episodes feature some of the
most well-remembered and often-talked about installments, including “Nightmare
at 20,000 Feet,” about the gremlin on the wing of the plane, and “Living Doll,”
the episode that introduced the fearsome toy, Talky Tina.

Other
episodes, like “The Bewitching Pool” and “Come Wander with Me” have also grown
in critical esteem since they were produced, and become part of the Twilight
Zone mystique, a discussion which always begins with the words “Do you remember the one where…”

Incidentally,
Season Five also aired the award-winning short-film “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge,” simultaneously a budget-saving expedient and a great Twilight
Zone installment. And one fifth season episode "Steel," by Richard Matheson was remade recently as the film Real Steel.

Here are
five highlights from the underrated Twilight Zone, Season Five

5. “Number Twelve
Looks Just Like You.” In this episode penned by Charles Beaumont,
set in the year 2000, all eighteen year-olds in America must undergo a “transformation,”
a physical re-shaping into a perfect specimen.

The problem is that there are only a handful of available models, so
by-and-large, everyone in this future society looks like everyone else.

One girl, Marilyn (Collin Wilcox) doesn’t
wish to conform to society’s standard of beauty, especially because all those
who do, including her mother (Suzy Parker) seem vapid and obsessed with
appearances. Society eventually forces
Marilyn to comply, and after her plastic surgery she immediately proves just as shallow
and superficial as everyone else.

Produced
in 1964, this episode gazes at both excessive political correctness (it’s
unfair for some people to be beautiful when others are not!), and America’s
always-growing obsession with youth and unnecessary plastic surgery. In the age of Paris Hilton and the
Kardashians -- when appearance not substance matters -- “Number Twelve Looks Just
Like You” is more timely than over.

4. “Living Doll.” I don’t really have to write anything about the values of this episode here except: “I’m Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.” This episode is so intriguing because the terrifying living doll is actually, in a weird way, a force of good.

Here, the doll grapples with a nasty
stepfather (Telly Savalas) who emotionally brutalizes his new family. Tina is murderous all right, but the stepfather
certainly has it coming, and a little girl needs to be protected.

Justice is a concept the series often dealt with here, and here a talking doll is the one to mete it.

3. “The Masks” Directed by Ida Lupino, this
Zone tells the story of an old man on the verge of death, Jason Foster (Robert
Keith). During Mardi Gras he holds a
family gathering for the ungrateful relatives who seek to control and inherit
his fortune. He requires each of his ungrateful relatives to adorn a hideous
mask until midnight.

The masks are
grotesque, and carved by an old Cajun. Each of the masks expresses a quality of
its wearer, showing, respectively, vanity, avarice, sadism and the like. When midnight strikes and the masks are taken
off, the wearers are permanently changed, their real faces now reflecting those inner qualities...for
the whole world to recognize on sight.

This
ghoulish episode, which also reveals to audiences the face of death, corrects a flaw in
everyday human existence: You can’t always tell
what’s in a person’s heart by looking at them, can you? With these masks, you can see – straight up –
the ugliness that might be found inside.
It’s a macabre segment, and though the victims wholly deserve their fate,
one also feels a sympathetic sense of horror at the thought of having to go through life with a
face twisted by those masks.

2. “Come Wander with Me.” I’ve made no secret of my absolute love for
this episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s one of my all-time favorites. Here, the
Rock-a-Billy Kid, Floyd Burney (Gary Crosby) goes to backwoods Appalachia in
hopes of exploiting the local music scene (and musicians), but instead comes
across his own unpleasant fate, and a song that expresses his story.

That particular song, “Come Wander with Me,” is one of
the most haunting things you’ll ever hear, and as it is replayed in the
episode, again and again, it grows increasingly menacing, changed with new and upsetting lyrics. The song was resurrected by
director Vincent Gallo for his 2003 film, Brown Bunny.

1. “Nightmare at
20,000 Feet.”Written by Richard Matheson and directed by Richard Donner,
this episode aired originally on October 11, 1963, and is one of the show's
most legendary efforts. In fact it's one of those stories that has become part of the
American pop culture lexicon, and seems to have effortlessly survived the test
and passage of time (and was remade, in 1983'sTwilight Zone: the
Movie).

You all know the plot of this episode by heart: a man named Robert Wilson
(age 37), played by William Shatner has recently recovered from a nervous
breakdown caused by"over-stress"and"under confidence." The
incident that spurred his six months in a sanitarium occurred on a plane in
flight. Now Bob and his wife, Ruth
(Christine White) fly home, and Robert spies a gremlin walking on the plane
during flight..

I'll be blunt: if
there is a more pitch-perfect half-hour of horror television in the medium's
history, I haven't seen it. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” loses none of its
power (or terror...) on repeat viewing. The story draws you in, and the
universal fear of flying renders the story riveting. William Shatner’s twitchy performance is great, too. He
plays a man trying to hold on to his sanity, but a man who is likable and good.
We relate to his predicament and his fear on a very deep, very basic level. How good is “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet?” So good that you don’t care that the monster
looks like a cuddly, over-fed teddy bear.

Runner-ups on this list of great Season 5 episodes would include "Uncle Simon," about an old man's ultimate revenge upon his greedy niece, "Spur of the Moment" about a woman trying to correct her past and destroying her future, and "The Long Morrow" a tragic story about star-crossed, time-crossed lovers.

1 comment:

I agree with your choices, and especially with "Nightmare" as one of the perfect half-hours in TV history. William Shatner gets grief for his supposed overacting, which I've never agreed with--the better written the role, the better he generally is--but his subtlety in this episode is what makes it, in my opinion. That moment when he suddenly suspects the FBI agent of agreeing with him to patronize him is one of the finest penny-dropping moments ever caught on film.

It isn't the universality of the fear of flying that makes this episode great; it's the petrifying fear of being thought crazy because of a unique experience. It's the ambiguity of Wilson's precarious state of mind that lends extra stakes to this episode--even he isn't sure whether he's really recovered and actually seeing the gremlin, or having another breakdown. And though the audience finally knows at the end that Wilson's vision was real, we don't know if he is ever cleared.

Shatner in the 50's and 60's developed quite a portfolio of playing these trapped, desperate, internalized characters in nearly every available TV series, and Richard Matheson specialized in just that type of central character. I am just as fond of Season Two's "Nick of Time" as of this episode for that reason. What a great screenwriter Matheson was!

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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